ECS is definitely making in roads to the high end mainboard business. It is a good attempt to shake off the image that ECS is only for stable entry level boards. The ECS PN2 SLI2+ is just something that will start to change that. Based on the the NVIDIA nFORCE 680iSLI C55XE/MCP55PXE chipsets which consists of the North bridge C55XE and south bridge MCP55PXE. This board supports the LGA775 socket for Intel® Core 2 Quadro/Core™2 Extreme / Core™2 Duo /Pentium D / Pentium 4 /Celeron D Processors wiht FSB 1333(Core 2 Duo 1333)/1066/800/533 MHz. That is actually quite future proof as we would be expecting CPUs that clks at 333MHz in the near future.

The board also supports 1 x Ultra DMA133/100/66/33 port and 6 x Serial ATAII 3.0Gb/s devices. NVIDIA MediaShield™ RAID supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD. On board audio uses the Realtek ALC 885 for HD audio. The board also comes wiht Dual GbE using Marvell 88E1116 and TI's 1394a.
The package comes with 4 SATA cables, LAN, 2 USB+1394 bracket, 2 SATA powercable, Long SLI connector, eSATA bracket, IDE cable and  a cooling fan, CD ROM and manual.

In our benchmark tests, we used the Quad Core QX6700 processor and compared it with the Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 mainboard paired up with the same amount of DDR2 module (but run at DDR2-800). The benchmark shows that both board excels in many ways. In terms of 3D performance, we observe that ECS PN2 SLI2+ works better with the 7900GT card showing a better score. While in some of the other benchmarks, there is little difference in the scores.

The board has lots of overclocking features with adjustments of CPU, DIMM, Chipset voltages, ASync settings, ram timing adjustments. You can check the gallery for more details. In our test, the max we can reach is 470MHz x 6 or 3.7GHz (370x10) on the X6800 processor. The CPU Vcore is already set at 1.5v, vdimm at 2.1v. This seems to be limitation of the CPU we have. We tested the QX6700 (2.66GHz) and it just couldn't get stable at 3.7GHz on air cool at 1.5v (CPU). That is even with only one core running (the BIOS allows you to turn off the 2nd,3rd and 4th core).

We used the Corsair TWINX for all board tests and we didn't face any issues. One thing to note is that NVIDIA has put up a list of compatible RAM ram listed in the QVL list. Those are the recommended DDR2 modules that will work with the  board. As my RAM is SLI Ready, I can turn on the option in the BIOS that enables me to run my modules at DDR2-1066. The option of SLI is also something that SLI lovers cannot find on 965P boards. The system drivers allows direct BIOS modification within Windows. This is something that will be useful for some but i still prefer to meddle with the BIOS directly.

Pricing

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Pros

• 3 x PCIe x16 slots for SLI (2 PCIex16 and 1 PCiex8)
• Quad Core support
• Plenty of oc options in BIOS

Cons

• Chipset is hot
• Compatibility issue with DDR2, check QVL
• Expensive

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.